In nearly every Google algorithm update in recent memory, Google has rewarded old, megatraffic sites, sending their search rankings soaring at the expense of smaller, newer sites. Big sites have increased their search traffic by 28% year over year, according to GrowthBar’s organic search data on the 100 most visited sites.
Why? Large sites such as Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Amazon, Home Depot and Target have something the rest of us don’t — they’ve got years of built-up Google trust signals.
Start with best practices like making incredible content and securing backlinks to your best web pages, but also be willing to think a bit outside the box.
I’d contend that Google favors large sites more than ever before — and it’s a trend that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. After all, Google exists to deliver the best search experience to users. Bad search results would be a death sentence for their business, since Googlers would flock to alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Bing.
Especially today, where distrust of the media is at an all-time high, Google can’t risk its reputation by surfacing bad search results, so I think their algorithm errs on the side of caution. It’s simply safer for their business to surface household names at the top of the search engine results page, particularly in ultrasensitive your money, your life categories.
John Mueller, Google’s SEO mouthpiece, practically settled the debate that older sites are preferred by the algorithm when he said, ” … freshness is always an interesting one because it’s something that we don’t always use. Because sometimes it makes sense to show people content that has been established (SEJ).”
So, how can you hope to compete if you’re deploying an SEO strategy on one of the billions of smaller sites?
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Of course, you should start with best practices like making incredible content and securing backlinks to your best web pages, but you should also be willing to think a bit outside the box. The cards aren’t in your favor, so you need to be even more strategic than the big guys. This means executing on some cutting-edge hacks to increase your SEO throughput and capitalize on some of the arbitrage still left in organic search. I call these five tactics “advanced-ish,” because none of them are complicated, but all of them are supremely important for search marketers in 2021.
Scaling your time with content generators
Businesses spent over $300 billion on content marketing last year. That’s in part because creating new content is the most straightforward way to draw in organic search traffic. Whether you’ve got a mature site or you’re just starting a WordPress SEO site, content is likely a large part of your SEO strategy.
But to scale content like a startup, you’ll need to devote a lot of time to it and/or manage a fleet of writers. Your time is probably better spent building your product or helping customers than on planning hundreds of blog articles. This is precisely where a content generator tool comes into play.
A whole new era of SEO tools is emerging, and some of these are augmented by OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology, the most advanced artificial intelligence language model. These tools have changed the game for SEOs and content creators by automating parts of the content creation cycle. Several tools utilize SEO signals and combine them with OpenAI to help you create blog outlines that include SEO-optimized titles, word counts, keywords, headlines, intro paragraphs and much more.
Sure, you’ll still need to read, edit, and add your own voice and style to the content, but the primary benefit of using content generators is the time they save in the planning and iteration cycle. We’ve been able to bring our article-writing process down from four hours per article to around 90 minutes. Imagine what you could do with all that time!
AI is fundamentally changing how content creators and SEO do their jobs. GPT-3 isn’t going to replace what humans can do, but it will certainly make our lives easier. Plus, saving time working on your blog means you have more time to focus on other aspects of your growing business.
Rising categories
Any digital marketer who knows anything about SEO will tell you to do keyword research. They’re not wrong. You should start your SEO-research journey with keyword research to ensure your topic has search volume and isn’t so competitive that you have no chance of ranking.
The problem with keyword research is that everyone does it. All your biggest competitors are looking at the same reports you are, leaving little in terms of untapped opportunities.
One of the ways I’ve succeeded time and time again however, is by finding topics that are rapidly growing in popularity. For instance, imagine where you’d be if you started writing volumes of articles about Ethereum or starting an Amazon seller business five years ago. Traffic for those keywords may have looked unremarkable back then, but now both keywords get hundreds of thousands or even millions of searches per month. Plus, since we know Google values domain age, you’d be sitting pretty with authority on those topics.
A few places I like to look for rising keywords or categories include:
Your expertise: A few times I’ve been successful at choosing emerging topics straight out of my brain and have capitalized on them. Particularly if you have domain expertise in a field, you may have a little bit of information asymmetry to capitalize on.
Twitter: As a platform basically built on trends, Twitter can be a goldmine of information. If you suspect a category is growing, do a simple search and scroll back to see if your intuition is correct. I’ve used virtual assistants to catalog this data for me, as it can be a little tedious to gather.
Rising Retail Categories: Google released this product to help retailers react to the changing commerce landscape during COVID-19. It’s still a very useful tool for seeing exploding volume topics in and around the e-commerce landscape. It’s not a well-known tool either!
Google Trends: Most marketers know this one, but I’d be remiss not to mention it. Google Trends is Google’s tool for seeing search-volume growth over time. You can simply type in a search term and get a graph of search-volume changes. Personally, I think Trends data can be misleading and not always very accurate. It is helpful to identify seasonal changes in search volume, though.
The point is to get ahead of the trends. If you build an SEO strategy around emerging keywords that aren’t extremely highly searched or particularly competitive, you’ve got a better chance of beating out some larger competitors.
UX/UI for SEO
UX/UI matters a ton. You may be surprised to hear that solid features and site usability are not only good for users, they’re good for Google too. That’s because Google is in the business of showing awesome sites and pages to people who use its search engine.
For instance, at Growth Marketing Pro, we made a marketing agency finder so that our readers could find the agency that suits their marketing needs. We now rank ahead of huge sites like G2, Capterra and Clutch on keywords in this space. Why? We include a section for “noteworthy clients” next to each agency listing, which lets users see brand names that are using the agency they’re considering.
Once we added this small feature, our finder skyrocketed in the search results and today gets 5,000+ organic visitors per month for extremely high-value keywords. None of our competitors have this feature, and Google therefore favors our finder. It’s a “social proof” feature that keeps users on page longer.
Without a good user experience, few people will want to use a site no matter how great the information or products they offer. And a good user experience needs a good user interface — otherwise there’s nothing to experience.
I like to test user experience by making large, needle-moving changes to my site. I don’t A/B test small stuff, but I do play with the sitewide header, format of blog posts, sitewide CTAs and other functions that seriously impact UX/UI. It’s a really good way of improving SEO over larger competitors, who probably have old, rigid websites.
Use your competitors’ Google Ads
Many SEOs and entrepreneurs suffer a fundamental misunderstanding: Web traffic does not equal revenue. You can have a million visitors, but they need to convert to customers if you’re going to see ROI on your efforts. If they’re hitting your site for keywords unrelated to your offerings or for low-value search terms, then you have low-value traffic.
How do you make sure you’re getting the “right” traffic? Here’s a quick marketing secret: You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. If you can see that something is working well for one of your competitors, it will probably work well for you too, which is why doing some research on your competition is the way to go. Competitive research gets you inside your competitors’ strategies, giving you the power to find an edge or gap in their strategy and get ahead of the curve.
Using a competitive intelligence tools like GrowthBar, you can see whether your competitors are running paid Google Ads and which keywords they are bidding on. If they’re paying money to pop up first on Google, you can pretty much take it to the bank that those are some good keywords to try and rank organically for. In general, higher CPCs mean higher-value search terms, as that’s reflective of competitive keywords that everyone wants to pay Google for. So if you see search keywords they’re bidding on, consider an organic strategy utilizing those terms.
Graphics for the win
Did you know the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text? Or that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual? People respond better to visual information than plain text, and SEO marketers can definitely use this to their advantage.
According to GrowthBar, Zumper.com gets over 9 million organic searches a month. That’s in part because of their very effective ongoing infographic strategy. I’ve long admired them for using their proprietary local home rental data to create compelling infographics. Not only are their infographics irresistible for local residents, but they’ve managed to garner over 2 million backlinks because of them.
The most important point about graphics and infographics is distribution. Infographics are an amazing format for consuming content on the internet. They make any information you’re presenting easier to understand, especially when it comes to data that is harder to visualize. They also appeal to most audiences and are very enticing and shareable, which leads to social media amplification. Most importantly, they provide other bloggers and news media with content to embed into their own posts. This leads to backlinks, which we all know are key to driving quality traffic to your website.
How can you use infographics for SEO? If you’re a thought leader in your space or you have unique information that no one else does, turn it into a report or simple infographic. Put it out on social media and send to “friendlies” in your industry. Google will index your work and bloggers will inevitably pick them up and include them in their posts.
We run a yearly SEO survey that tends to garner lots of backlinks, because the proprietary data gets mentioned by bloggers looking to cite hard statistics in their content.
But before you start including any old visual into your content to drive up engagement, remember: Visuals only make a difference when they are extremely interesting and proprietary. If the data is uninteresting or not unique to your business, nobody will engage.
Other companies that do a great job with visuals include Glassdoor, Zendesk and HubSpot. Each of them has business data that no one else does, making for very interesting, citeable content.
So the next time you start writing a killer content piece, don’t forget to include some visuals. Zumper has been able to leapfrog larger players in their space like Redfin and Zillow for queries related to “rentals” because of infographics and you can do it too.
Conclusion
Dethroning the biggest websites in your space won’t be easy. But remember, the big guys are lumbering giants. Rigid, outdated websites, corporate bureaucracy and resistance to change mean that they probably move slower than you can. If you take advantage of 2021 SEO best practices, you stand a chance to beat them for keywords you care about.
Remember: Scale your time with modern technology like content generators and keep your head on a swivel for emerging keywords and for any small advantages you can find. There are pots of gold all over the Google SERP. If you’re smart in 2021 you can capture some of it for your business.